After beginning an extensive reorganization early last
year, the Federal Aviation Administration has made
progress streamlining its operations and reducing its
management ranks, according to the Air Traffic
Organization’s chief operating officer.
The agency was authorized last year to make the
36,000-employee ATO workforce more “customer-focused,”
bottom-line oriented and fiscally responsible and
immediately began removing layers of management and
reducing the number of high paid non-executive
positions by 9 percent, according to COO Russ Chew,
who spoke before the House Committee on Transportation
and Infrastructure, Subcommittee on Aviation at a
hearing about the agency’s transformation.
FAA also began boiling down administrative services
and cutting overhead “by consolidating work under one
service unit rather than having it spread throughout
the organization as it was prior to the ATO,”
something initially confined to Washington D.C.
operations, but is a practice the agency will continue
“as it expands its efforts in the field,” said Chew.
He said there are now 10 operations and support
service units “accountable for achieving specified,
measurable results,” and that efforts to bring
employees closer to the people using the system have
been successful.
During the first year of operation, the agency created
financial baselines to ensure service units would have
cost accounting and labor distribution reports,
started a five-year business planning process tied to
the “flight plan,” and incorporated operational and
financial commitments, Chew said.
He said the agency would use assessments of the value
of core functions made last year to guide investments
in programs and services, and that along with the labor
and distribution reports, would allow the new financial
management system to be used as a basis for an ATO
cost-control program.
“This new approach to financial management will help
us develop analytic tools to make management decisions
based on sound business principles,” said Chew.
